Extremism, Patriotism and the Realistic
Expectations of Domestic Disarmament

By Alex Osinski

It was in the spring of 1995
that I gave a presentation to a Sociology class detailing what was at the time
the likelihood of a civil war brewing in the United States over issues
surrounding domestic disarmament and the rise of the militia movement in the USA
in part due to events that transpired in Ruby Ridge Idaho and Waco Texas a few
years prior. That presentation came shortly before spring break and
it was during that break the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was blown
up.

At the time, I had been in contact
with some of the principal characters of the militia movement in that
day. Mark Koernke of the Michigan Militia, John Trochtman of
Montana, and JJ Johnson (then still living outside Cleveland).
I was at the time still approaching the movement from the standpoint of a
sympathetic researcher and journalist. While none claimed
responsibility for the bombing, and some (primarily Trochman) asserted that
government agents secretly blew the building up themselves (as he still asserts
ten years later), I watched how all but Mr. Koernke were quickly thrust into the
national spotlight of congressional hearings. JJ Johnson's statement
summed a lot of it up when he told the committee chairman when pressured for an
explanation as to the beliefs of why the militias were forming to apparently
fight the government "frankly Sir, what is going on here is a lot of
people are pissed off".

Regardless of who actually blew up
the Murrah Federal Building or why, there are and were some basic facts
contributing to the rise of the militia movement in the US and Canada and the
potential impact of a conflict with them on American society. Whether it
was a "pissed off" former soldier deciding to take justice into his
own hands over perceptions of unanswered human rights violations on the part of
government agents, or a conspiracy within the government to pre-empt the brewing
revolution and destroy evidence of wrongdoing at Waco, we do know that the OKC
bombing was brought about as a consequence of the "gun control issue"
and the way gun laws had been enforced in a number of high profile cases through
the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Proponents of gun prohibition and
"Domestic Disarmament" as then popular political philosopher Amatoi
Etzioni put it, considered the task of disarming the American public to be a
realistic goal to be accomplished by the Clinton administration by the end of
Clinton's second term. Their idea was to first pass the early
versions of what we now know to be the Patriot Act, but a the time was known as
the Omnibus anti crime and terrorism bill. That included basically
everything we now know as the Brady gun bans, the Patriot act and some other
anti-liberty pieces of legislation put together in one big bad bill that was
heavily supported and promoted by numerous government agencies, think tanks, and
even foreign diplomatic interests. What survived the culling in the
legislature at the time became known as the Clinton Anti-Crime bill.

It was in that spring of 1995 I
gave the presentation to the class shortly before showing one of the documentary
videos about the events at Waco. This presentation was to
illustrate some of the numbers involved in what many in law enforcement promised
would be a challenging but successful growth in public safety.
Others promised a bloody campaign of civil war and terror.

I asked for a show of raised hands
among the class as to how many thought that the NRA membership represented an
extremist view on that scale of gun rights. Around 60% of the
class (including the Professor) raised their hands. Asked if they
felt the NRA represented a majority or significant number of rank and file
Americans, nobody raised their hands. Asked if the present military
and law enforcement apparatus would be able to handle the resistance of that
minority of extremists when they chose not to obey laws that they felt would be
in violation of the constitution, there was some discussion among the class, and
slowly in agreement with each other, hands began to go up but arguments began to
break out. There began to emerge a group within the class that
thought any serious enforcement against an armed extremist minority would have
to include the formation or expansion of some sort of government agency to
coordinate such and effort. Some of us at the time knew of one
of the professors who was part of a "focus group" of law enforcement
officials and criminal justice experts with extensive counterinsurgency military
experience who was on one of those planning committees along with an FBI
official who had lectured to another class earlier in the Semester.

What was significant about
involving the students and professor in this presentation was that they
represented the future of government leadership in this country, many of them
majoring in political science, sociology and criminal justice expected
employment with government agencies, think tanks and lobbying groups shortly
after graduating from college. Their knowledge and expectations
being highly relevant to future developments in law and administration of
government policy.

At the time, the NRA had boasted 3
million current members. That is roughly equal to the number of
people in the US military during the height of the Cold War. Now ten
years later, the NRA has reached 4.5 million and I will modify the original
presentation to reflect this as a base figure.

As we reach into the "best
case scenario" for such a gun prohibition, we look at some facts from other
legal prohibitions and past conflicts. First there had been a gun
ban in California at the time and the most reliable figures from California DOJ
showed that only 10%of the owners of banned guns had registered them with the
state. When individuals from the other 90% were interviewed as to
why they did not register their guns, most cited a fear of the guns being
confiscated if the government managed to register them. Others
hinted at using those same guns to fight a guerilla war against the
government.

OK, so back to the
scenario. If we consider the most optimistic operational
expectations of this special anti-gun owner task force, we consider the
stereotype "Bubba" gun owner is represented in 90% of the
NRA. He will drop his guns and run at the first sight of any force
that might be used against him. He is a law and order Republican,
and when push comes to shove, he will obey and idolize the law of the land
regardless of who or why it was put into place. The remaining 10%
are, in the eyes of the gun prohibitionists and law enforcement, "the
problem".

The Problem 10%

Lets look at the problem 10% for a
minute. These are in the admission of the opposition, the extreme of
the extreme. They have guns, they know how to use them, and they are
pissed about being outlawed. They have already decided to defy the
law. Many have military and law enforcement training and experience
along with a significant number who are presently in the military or law
enforcement at any given time. It is this 10%, or roughly 450,000
people who the gun prohibitionists will universally agree are at the core of
their "problem".

Fast forward to the extremely
optimistic assumption that this super "domestic disarmament agency" or
DDA could identify these 10% for targeting at the beginning of a major
confiscatory sweep. Perhaps armed with blacklists, mass warrants or
whatever, some sort of special law enforcement unit would be tasked with serving
warrants on these 450,000 angry, armed and recently disenfranchised individuals
for the purpose of confiscating their weapons and putting them in
prison. This would all supposedly happen with little or no
significant negative consequences to the general infrastructure in the
US. A well funded, well trained and well chosen task force would in
theory be able to out plan, out maneuver and outgun this problem 10% using
advanced data management, high tech monitoring techniques, high tech weapons,
superior mental attitude, and highly qualified well trained professionals at
every level of the enforcement organization.

Assume that 90% of such cordon and
seize operations are successful. The problem 10% were identified,
there were no significant number of innocents lost or attendant lawsuits or
protests from otherwise disinterested elements of society and none of the law
enforcement or hired "special Marshalls" are harmed. 90%
of the "problem 10%" prove incompetent and unwilling t actually put up
an effective fight when push comes to shove, and thus give in or get
killed. That leaves us with the "really bad problem 1%"

The 1%

Just one percent of those
angry armed formerly proudly patriotic citizen gun owners is a force of 45,000
people. 45,000 is a larger force of guerillas than have been fielded
by only the largest and most effective guerilla organizations in the
world. The IRA at the height of its campaigns against the British
are said to have only fielded 300 fighters in Britain and 50,000 in Ireland
itself. The IRA as a whole, for all its fame as a terrorist organization
(or freedom fighters depending on who you ask) in reality currently fields fewer
fighters than any one of the major Los Angeles street gangs.

Al-Queda at this point is
estimated to have around 15,000 to 20,000 trained fighters spread worldwide, of
course this is not fully counting the associated groups in hotspots like
Chechnya or Iraq. That Al-Queda number comes from a small percentage
of the Billions of Moslems worldwide, but likewise, our number for this
illustration comes from just the extreme 1% of the NRA.

In this fantasy scenario, even the
most ambitious and optimistic casualty estimates place a one for one ratio when
it comes to the 1%. That brings us to a point where we must ask what
is the realistic consequence of 45,000 serious casualties (dead or disabled)
within any government agency in say, a five year period? What is the
replacement cost of each one of those personnel? The life insurance
outlay? Lost productivity and lost taxes from their remaining life
income? You can start multiplying the big numbers starting in the
million and a half dollar per man figure. Make it up on
confiscated property? Fat chance, since those 1% would likely have been
disenfranchised in the prep leading up to the conflict in the first
place. This means there would be little of any liquid value
recovered in forfeiture of their assets the way has been done to those targeted
in the drug war. The reality of the drug war, in contrast to the war
on gun ownership, is that both sides tend to actually play softer than they
could because playing harder would upset profits that would no doubt be lost if
the war were to escalate. The Columbian cartels have repeatedly
demonstrated this in their fights with that country's government.

In consideration of the extreme optimism of the "1%" scenario that
gives us an estimated 45,000 hard core fighters. Lets look at some
other numbers:

10% of the NRA are currently or
recently in the military or law enforcement. There goes operational
secrecy or integrity for a lot of the roundup operations. That also
whittles away on the operational technique edge that a hostile military or law
enforcement might have if it is recruiting from the same pool of qualified
personnel as their opposition.

There are well over 100,000
registered machineguns in this country, which represent an estimated 10% of the
actual number in circulation. Granted, most people who have a
machinegun in their collection have more than one but it is likely that actual
dedicated fighters would actually not be lacking for firepower obtained from an
existing pool of available weapons not readily accountable en masse to the
government.

Nobody has been able to come up
with a reliable number of semiautomatic assault weapons distributed in the USA,
but for sake of argument, most groups agree there are around 200 million guns in
circulation in the USA, and that around 2% would fit the definition as
"semiautomatic assault weapon". Doing the math of large
numbers, we come up with a distribution of four million assault weapons
circulating on the US market. Again, only a small percentage are
currently accountable in any registration scheme.

The governments of the world which
have proven only marginally competent in halting the distribution of narcotics
and can barely expect to prevent third world dictators and terrorists from
getting weapons of mass destruction expect to be able to halt illegal arms
shipment between willing buyers and sellers.

The Vietnamese have proven that a technologically
primitive but clever resistance are capable of consuming vast resources of
an advanced adversary. The Iraqi resistance is proving that guerillas can
use open source technology to offset a lack of the levels of massive manpower
used by the Vietnamese.

Nobody has ever successfully
suppressed a single US state since the Civil war, and the various surrender
treaties that ended the US Civil war along with demobilization of the
Confederate Army were very conditional. All of the major gun
prohibitionist campaigns are based in part on the cooperation of all 50 state
legislatures and the attendant resources they are in control of.

The distribution of intelligent
and qualified leadership is not exclusively on one side or the
other. The prohibitionist disarmament side tends to be dominated by
well paid and qualified professionals, but they draw from the same pool of
military and academics as their opposition with an emphasis on psychological
profiles that replace deep personal and religious patriotic commitment with a
fragile system of professional ethics which at its core is driven by greed and
ego. Character weaknesses that are likely to greatly influence the
nature of the organizations which they run.

Most modern weapons combine
readily available computer and optics technology with metallurgy technology that
dates to the 1930s but can be manufactured to greater precision of better
materials more cheaply using modern manufacturing methods.
Clandestine manufacture of firearms could quickly mitigate the loss of imports
and an above the table firearms market. Unlike clandestine narcotics
manufacture, there is not the same need for sustained production in order to
supply a local market, only occasional and infrequent production is necessary to
equip a resistance force already existing in close proximity to an advanced
industrial economy.

The "terrorists" in the
1% scenario are already fluent in the language and social customs of the United
States and readily capable of blending into society when not actively resisting
the regime.

Nearly universal compliance with
the gun laws has caused extreme hardship and undue cost to the Canadian
government in spite of even their most pessimistic estimates and frequent budget
restructuring within their police forces.

No foreign army has ever been able
to suppress the United States as a whole, and it was a wet dream among the
Communists who understood that they needed to overrun most of Europe in addition
to knocking over most of Latin America before even attempting any invasion of
the US mainland. The idea that the UN would or could raise an army
capable of suppressing and occupying even a few US states is absurd in light of
the fact they have proven inept at even stabilizing any significant number of
African countries that contain massive wealth in natural resources which could
be harvested and distributed to participating nations as payment for such an occupation.

The reality of a massively
enforced gun ban in the United States is impossible, absurd, and unrealistic,
but we live in times where truth is often stranger than fiction.